The Three Blessings: Boundaries, Censorship, and Identity in Jewish Liturgy

Yoel Kahn

Abstract

According to the Talmud (Menahot 43b), a Jewish man should give thanks each day “not having been made a gentile … a woman … nor a slave.” This study traces the history of this text in the Jewish Morning Blessings (Birkhot ha-shachar) across two thousand years of history. Marking the boundary between “us” and “them,” marginalized and persecuted groups used these lines to affirm their own identity and sense of purpose. After the medieval Church seized and burned books it considered offensive, new, coded formulations emerged as forms of spiritual resistance. Owners voluntarily carefully expurgate ... More

According to the Talmud (Menahot 43b), a Jewish man should give thanks each day “not having been made a gentile … a woman … nor a slave.” This study traces the history of this text in the Jewish Morning Blessings (Birkhot ha-shachar) across two thousand years of history. Marking the boundary between “us” and “them,” marginalized and persecuted groups used these lines to affirm their own identity and sense of purpose. After the medieval Church seized and burned books it considered offensive, new, coded formulations emerged as forms of spiritual resistance. Owners voluntarily carefully expurgated their books to save them from being destroyed, creating new language and meanings while seeking to preserve the structure and message of the received tradition. Renaissance Jewish women ignored rabbis’ objections to declare assertively that their gratitude at being “made a woman and not a man.” Hebrew manuscripts demonstrate creative literary responses to censorship and show that official texts and interpretations do not fully represent the historical record. As Jewish emancipation began in the 19th century, modernizing Jews again had to balance fealty to historical practice with their own and others’ understanding of their place in the world. Seeking to be recognized as modern and European, early modern Jews rewrote the liturgy to fit modern sensibilities and identified themselves with the Christian West against the historical pagan and the uncivilized infidel. In recent decades, a reassertion of ethnic and cultural identity has again raised questions of how the Jewish religious community should define itself.

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